Who Really Owns Your Phone?

I was working on some text about interoperability on the web, and found myself getting up in arms about how far we've strayed from the initial ideals of the internet.  The web was founded on principles of open, democratic access.  Any computer could put up a website; given an internet service provider, any user could connect to it.

There has been a trend towards closed platforms controlled by a single company, the most popular being Apple's App Store.  These walled gardens offer many benefits -- users can (usually) trust the applications they install, there's one place to go to look for apps, and developers have a centralized place to focus on promotion.  Overall app stores greatly simplify the mobile app experience.

But of course, they have their downsides.  Namely, they are sucking away our freedom and rights to run whatever code we want on our devices.  Developers are subject to arbitrary rejections -- Omar said that a friend's app was recently rejected for being too "avant garde", whatever that means -- which keeps them out of the primary distribution channel, and not available to users at all.

So, just avoid the app store, right?  Not so easy.  The debate over HTML5 websites vs. native apps on mobile is an excellent example of this. HTML5 offers platform independence, ease of updating code, and freedom from app store censorship. Native means the app will be faster, work offline, and have more access to phone hardware.  Which app is going to be more pleasant for the user?

What really frightens me, and makes me feel incredibly hypocritical for writing this on a MacBook Air, is the thought that Apple might make this the dominant model for desktop apps, too.  They are already sort of trying with the App Store on OSX.  I definitely don't want an Apple approval process coming between my laptop and what code I can run.  To be fair, it's a bit worrisome that Google is trying to move to a world where I don't have any access to my hardware except through a (Google-controlled) web browser.

Downloading, compiling, and running arbitrary code is not just for hackers.  The ability to do this is vital for encouraging competition and giving users choice.

Similarly on the web, there's a movement to closed sites that hold our data hostage.  And even though they might offer ways to download our data in a lump, they don't offer easy connections to share and move data between services.  The worst is when they arbitrarily decide to treat services differently and promote or debilitate one over another; see the Instagram/Twitter fiasco.  More and more user creation is moving behind these walls, making it inaccessible to third party applications.  This stifles innovation -- we have to wait for a single company to decide to build and push out features, instead of farming out this work to the wide world of developers, and seeing what sticks.

Unfortunately I don't have any answers, just questions:

What kind of technology can we build that encourages and promotes interoperability in this new world? 

How do we solve the issues of safety and curation if we don't use app store walled gardens?  

What kind of understanding do users have about their choices, and how do we encourage them to make ones that are in their best long term interests?

2012 Predictions

Cause, why not?

Here are some ruminations on what might happen this year.

Silicon Valley continues to be surprised the other half of the population exists.

More and more "surprising" success stories (like that of Pinterest or Fab.com) will surface.  There's so much room for growth in areas involving fashion and lifestyle design.  The shopping process for clothes, makeup, personal care products, shoes, jewelry, and home decor is still so flawed.  People who are interested in those areas currently don't have the buying experience that someone who wants, say, a camera would have, and the thought process of the consumer when purchasing those items is usually more irrational -- a random post on a small blog or a picture in a magazine can lead to desire and products selling out.

The explosion of curation and information management applications.

Things are getting crazy.  It's too easy to constantly spend time dipping into the firehose of information coming from friends, email, facebook, blogs, twitter, and other sources online.  We're already seeing the growing popularity of private information management tools like Evernote and Instapaper, and what will come next are even more sophisticated tools to enable a user to quickly skim through a deluge of information, saving the bits and pieces that seem relevant, and then providing contextual results on whatever device when it's relevant.

And editors and curators will become even more important.  We'll start to place a growing proportion of trust in the most popular voices, simply because there's too much to deal with and we need help filtering.

Local businesses will wise up.

Local businesses will start spending smarter to advertise online.  The good businesses will only offer deals when it makes sense to them -- during down times or to get rid of surplus inventory.  Only low quality businesses that have trouble getting customers will continue to offer blanket deals like we see now.  We will also see a lot more dynamic pricing.

Several major security breaches.

In terms of security, things are going to get worse before they get better.  Web application security is still full of holes.  I predict more major companies will experience data loss, and more rogue groups will cause trouble -- and I don't just mean groups like Anonymous defacing company websites, I mean malicious hackers (who might be nationally supported) disrupting food supply chains, utilities, or other major services that aren't properly protected.  

procrastination

I am supposed to be working on my master's thesis proposal. So of course instead, I am reading twitter (among other completely wasteful things), and in addition to seeing rumors that Google might buy Yelp, I saw that Groupon was valued at 250 million dollars.

Um, holy crap.  This company is a year old!  And apparently they are making money hand over fist!  This is brilliant in so many ways.  First, it plays off people's irrational desire to buy something just because it's a deal.  Then, it works on our instinct to grab something because it's expiring soon.  Finally, it takes advantage of our laziness, because what percentage of people actually go redeem the thing they pre-bought?  And does Groupon get to keep that money if they don't go redeem the coupon?  Cause I have a page sitting on my desk that's supposed to get me a year long pass to the Brattle ($30 for a $104 value!) which has been sitting here for over a month.  And will definitely be sitting here for at least another 3 weeks.  If I were them I would play like the airplanes and oversell a deal a little in anticipation that some people will never go redeem it.

Brilliant.

tweet tweet

If you don't use twitter, you won't care about this post. FYI.

I wrote a little python commandline script to tell me followers I've gained and lost. The gained part twitter already implements (you can get emailed or just visit your follower page; new followers are at the top) but it doesn't give me a way of seeing who has stopped following me, and I got curious when I saw the numbers fluctuate a lot. I have been meaning to hook this up as a cron job to email me once a day; that way one could theoretically track if certain tweets are making people unsubscribe :) I need to install some mail server thing on my machine though.

This was a tiny little twitter-related project to poke at the API when i was sick, not something i did because i'm really crazy about who is following me (i realize you probably don't believe that). If anyone knows how to adjust the code so that I don't constantly run into the 100 requests/hour limit, please let me know. Oh, and I did not pay attention to performance, robustness, or portability when writing this so don't make fun of me.

If you want to use it, download the script, make a subfolder called "gold" and run

python tw.py gen neha

to generate a gold file of who is following neha, and

python tw.py diff neha

to see followers neha has gained/lost since the last time you ran it. After the initial gen you will not need to run it again unless you want to fastforward a lot.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~neha/tw.py

Update: Added error checking and it continues if a twitter id returned as a follower is bogus (which happens, interestingly enough)